Lunascape 6.0 Orion Beta Released

There are a number of browsers allowing you to switch between rendering engines, with Lunascape being one of them. We’ve covered this browser before quite extensively, and today, the Lunascape team released the first beta of Lunascape 6 ORION, the bext version of this triple-engine web browser.

As a browser, Lunascape probably has the most to offer to web developers, who can use a single application to check how their work looks in three different rendering engines, namely Trident, Gecko, and WebKit. It also comes with features like script and Java blocking, and when using the Trident engine, you can block ActiveX too.

This new version adds a number of very welcome features, chief among which is seamless support for Firefox add-ons. You can transfer your installed add-ons to Lunascape, but you can also install new ones. This allows for a great deal of flexibility, but an obvious limitation is that the add-ons work only when using the Gecko rendering engine – pages rendered with Trident or WebKit are unaffected.

Another new feature which will surely be appreciated by web developers is the ability to split tabs within the same window, so you can easily show the same web page being rendered by the three different supported engines. This way, you can easily compare how your work renders in the three different engines.

The interface has also been given an update, but in my short period of using it, I found this by far the weakest aspect of Lunascape. It uses Qt4, but redraw performance (for instance, when resizing) is absolutely terrible, there are visual artefacts all over the place, and it doesn’t follow any of the Windows Aero UI conventions – it’s all custom. This means GDI-like performance, no shadows, and so on. Behaviourally, I find the interface very cluttered and overwhelming, with little to no logic applied to where items are located.

However, that’s nitpicking from someone who really isn’t part of Lunascape’s intended audience. The main attraction here is Lunascape’s triple rendering engine, which could make the browser an invaluable tool for web developers. It’s still in beta, so things could still improve, too.

If you want more browsers, it’s a much better choice having separate clean installs. A actualized browser is a major software achievement. Now I don’t see the point of handling 3 different engines just for the sake of it.

I agree. Plus slapping rendering engines in what is essentially a different browser introduces extra parameters in the equation and you can no longer be sure your page will render exactly the same way in the real browser.

Just look at Chrome and Safari: they both use Webkit yet they render differently.

And in the end, having 3 different browsers opened is not that big a deal.

Both these don’t have the multiple operating system support code, so although they are more fully featured than Firefox, they run faster.

Partially correct. Not being cross-platform helps with the source code, but not with the resulting binary. It’s not like Firefox for Windows includes stuff that is only relevant for the Gnome interface integration. So no, not being cross platform does not necessarily result in a leaner application.

Secondly, these overlaying browsers lack XUL, which is Firefox’s “interface virtual machine”. Yeah, it makes them consume less resources but they also lose extension support. So I’m not sure why you’d say they have more features, I don’t see how any single hardcoded browser can achieve the same as Firefox + thousands of extensions can achieve. Perhaps if you only take into account one single user and a very specific (and limited) feature set.

But if you only want a Windows browser with a specific limited feature set, why use such a hybrid? There are very good standalone browsers out there you can use for this. Opera and Chrome are the first to spring to mind.

Out of the box, K-Meleon comes with 15+ like extensions that do not feature in vanilla Firefox. Yes Firefox has done new polished improvements, K-Meleon is older and changes have come more incremental.

As for Lunascape, like Thom said, it has a cluttered and complex interface, so I expect it to be chock full of features. I don’t run Windows, and stuff under wine rarely works, so I haven’t tested it for myself, though.

Or maybe Lunascape pretends to be fully featured, like Acrobat Reader:)

As for Chrome and Opera, Chrome has no menus by default; is slower then K-Meleon, and Opera doesn’t feel right and doesn’t make up for it by not increasing the font size easily.

I have done some web development, but as you can see OSNews.com also caters for the old technical farts of yesteryear that can install OpenBSD a thousand times but don’t keep up with the pace of technology this last decade:)

A few years ago I’d have called it a useful tool for web developers… Who are the only audience I can figure. Anyone else who cares about running IE will, well, run IE… Anyone running alternative browser engines are usually running them because they are NOT IE, and integrating IE destroys the good reasons to do so (like security). (excepting perhaps the whackjobs who think they are better off in Maxthon)

It’s not as useful as IEtester since it’s single trident engine either… without XUL underneath it you don’t have firebug or the web developer toolbar… and given that I’ve seen rendering differences between safari and chrome saying “webkit is the same” isn’t all that believable.

Much like that last version of Netscape that flushed what little credibility they had down the crapper, I’m not really sure who this is for…

Since the core components of WebKit (WebCore and JavaScriptCore) are licensed as LGPL we can be fairly sure that all the entities who package WebKit browsers will keep these components in sync with the official WebKit source. But the rest is BSD licensed so there may be subtle differences in the rest of a browser’s code for which we don’t get to see the source code, because BSD doesn’t mandate it.

It should be pointed out that what Apple did with WebKit was very smart and basically forcefully opened the browser world to yet another alternative rendering engine. It used to be a very closed world, with Trident (IE) owning the place, then Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox) painstakingly making a breach, and Opera picking up the pieces.

WebKit started as Apple’s fork of KHTML/KJS (the KDE web/JS rendering engines), with which they exchanged patches. But that didn’t work out very well, logistically, because while Apple was releasing source code modification in order to observe LGPL, KDE didnt’ have the manpower to process those patches in the form Apple was issuing them (as big blobs), and Apple wasn’t in the mood to take this further and do the KDE team’s job too.

So they did something very smart and reasonable: they took over the entire project, pushed for it replacing KHTML, offered hosting and resources and there you have it, an engine which a LOT of browsers can use. Why was it so important? Because Opera and IE aren’t open source so nobody else can use their engines (not under very permissive terms), and Gecko is a rather large beast.

Much like that last version of Netscape that flushed what little credibility they had down the crapper, I’m not really sure who this is for…

In all fairness, that was mostly AOL’s blunder. None of the Netscape versions past 4 were really “Netscape”. Version 5 was a complete rewrite with extremely bad timing and it drove the Netscape company into the ground. That code later became Mozilla, the web browser/mail/chat combination that eventually spawned Firefox, Thunderbird and the XUL engine as separate entities.

AOL always had this obsession about giving their customers a browser branded by them, so they took Mozilla, called it Netscape 6 (then 7, then 8 and so on), slapped some branding and ads on it and ran with it. At some point before finally letting it die, they included dual rendering (Gecko and Trident) in it.

But yes, it was a strange beast without much merit other than marketing.

they actually skipped Netscape 5. There was a lot of released code based on 4.x that could’ve been 5 but it was dumped. Mozilla decided to start from scratch with the gecko engine and Netscape 6 was the first browser based on it. Mozilla browser came later. It didn’t really excite the web either until it was transformed into Firefox.